During the colonial era, European countries set up outposts in Africa where they could get cheap labor and natural resources. And today Europeans build solar farms in Africa, extracting sunlight from the Sahara to power high-tech cities in the north.

According to Inhabitat:

If just one percent of the Saharan Desert were covered in concentrating solar panels it would create enough energy to power the entire world . . . The EU has a mission to take at least 20% of their entire energy from renewable resources by 2020. Last year they announced that they would lay a series of highly-efficient cables across the Mediterranean, build a series of solar power plants in the Sahara, and import renewable energy from across the sea. The initiative is being financed by a group of European companies and is supported by the EU government. The plan is to cover 6,500 square miles of the desert in photovoltaic systems and wind parks.

Supposedly the energy-extraction could start as early as 5 years from now, but the project as a whole probably won't be finished until 2050. No word on how much of the energy from these solar farms will be used in Africa.